A marker is a labeled point on the timeline. Every song, every break, every voicetrack, every live-mic event is a marker. Together, they turn an opaque 24-hour audio file into a readable map of the broadcast day.
DayTracker collects markers from three sources, all writing to the same daily CSV:
silence_start event, and a matching silence_end event when audio returns. DayTracker writes both to the CSV automatically as they arrive.The shape of a marker tells you what kind of event it represents, before you read the label:
| Shape | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Vertical tick line | An hour boundary. One every 60 minutes, labeled with the hour. |
| Horizontal bar | A span — break, voicetrack body, live-mic body, or EAS activation. The width is the duration. |
| Right-pointing triangle | An IN event — voicetrack IN, live-mic ON. Flat edge sits on the timestamp; the apex points into the span. |
| Left-pointing triangle | An OUT event — voicetrack OUT, live-mic OFF. Flat edge sits on the timestamp; the apex points back into the span. |
| Pin | An instantaneous event — song start or end, custom note, silence start, silence end. A small triangular pinhead over a thin body. |
Silence markers are drawn in orange so they jump off the page. Two markers bracket each silence event: silence_start when the dead air begins, and silence_end when audio comes back. Hover either one to see how long the silence lasted.
These events are detected upstream by AutoCast (or whichever suite app is watching for dead air) and broadcast over PartyLine. DayTracker doesn't do its own silence detection — it just writes down what the bus tells it.
A cluster of silence markers in the Notes lane is usually the first sign that something is wrong upstream — a failed playout, an unmounted audio device, or a network drop between AutoCast and DayTracker. Scrub to the orange and listen.
Move your mouse over any marker and the status bar at the bottom of the window shows the marker's full readout: its label, its time-of-day stamp, and (for spans) its duration. Move the mouse away and the status bar returns to showing the current scrub position.
The arrow keys jump between markers without having to aim with the mouse:
This is the fastest way to step from song to song or from break to break when you're auditing a slice of the day.
You can drop your own markers in the Notes lane to flag moments you want to revisit — a flubbed segue, a great call, a request worth saving. Right-click anywhere on the timeline and choose Add Note, type a short label, and press Return. The marker lands at the click point and is written to the day's CSV alongside the AutoCast and PartyLine events.
All markers for a given day live in a single CSV file alongside the audio. The columns are:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| timestamp | Time of day in ISO format. DayTracker uses wall-clock time, not seconds-since-start, so the file is human-readable. |
| kind | What kind of event: song_start, song_end, break_start, break_end, vt_start, vt_end, mic_start, mic_end, hour, custom, silence_start, silence_end. |
| label | The human-facing text — song title, voicetrack name, break number, or your custom note. |
| source | Where the marker came from: autocast, partyline, or user. |
You can open the CSV in any text editor or spreadsheet if you want to do your own offline analysis — for instance, to count voicetracks per shift or pull a playlist of every song played in a given hour.